1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to generating mail packages. More particularly, the present invention relates to an apparatus and method for quickly generating commercial quality printed materials suitable for distribution to customers through the mail.
2. Related Art
Many industries produce documents, reports and other materials that are sent to a commercial print center. The print center receives the materials in paper or electronic format along with a customer order. The customer order typically contains attributes or details of desired print products. For example, the customer order may specify a type of binding, a size and color of the paper to be used, the number of copies required, and a size, shape, color and type of any document tabs.
The print center prepares the received materials for rendering on one or more commercial printing devices. The rendering process usually involves scanning a number of paper documents or reading an electronic document. If the process involves reading an electronic document, the electronic document usually must be opened using a computer having an application program and operating system compatible with the application program and operating system that created the electronic document. For example, the electronic document may have been created on a computer running the Microsoft XP operating system and the application program Microsoft Publisher 2006. To read and prepare the electronic document for rendering, the print center must have a computer with a computer application capable of reading the electronic document.
As part of the rendering process, the print center manually enters information from the customer order into the computer or directly into printer equipment. In order to process the customer order, the computer or printer equipment generates a rendering script or program in an appropriate printer language such as Printer Control Language (PCL). The rendering script is read by the computer or printer equipment to determine the attributes of the print documents. The rendering script enables the printer equipment to produce print documents according to the customer order.
After printing the documents, the printing center packages the printed documents and ships them back to the customer. Alternatively, the customer may pick up the documents at the print center. After receiving the documents, the customer may inspect the documents, repackage the documents, apply mailing labels to the packages and then mail the packages to the customers. This print process is time consuming, costly and prone to error.
The title industry produces many title products that are electronically assembled before printing. Title products, such as a title portfolio, require an abstractor or title professional to find and assemble data from a variety of databases. The data includes data related to title and encumbrances on a parcel of land and may include, for example, a title history, maps defining a land parcel and a tract, a list of easements on or adjoining the land parcel, a list of the CC&Rs for the land tract, etc. The data will typically be printed out and electronically assembled to produce an integrated document.
The integrated document may then be sent to a print center with an abstractor or other title professional explaining to the print center the attributes of the documents to be printed so that the print center may fulfill the customer order. The print center uses the customer order and the integrated document to generate one or more rendering scripts for the print center's printer equipment. The printer equipment prints the documents and the print center assembles the documents into commercial quality print products. The print center mails the print products to the abstractor or title professional and then mails the print documents to the customer.
This conventional printing process is time consuming. The abstractor or title professional spends a lot of time manually assembling and producing a one of a kind document with instructions from the print center. The print center receives the document, enters print instructions to various print devices and duplicates the documents according to the instructions.
The result of this process is that the abstractor or title professional spends a lot of time working with a local print center to generate commercial quality print products for mailing to title customers. The title company spends time and resources receiving, repackaging, labeling and mailing print products to customers. The print center also spends a lot of time and resources attempting to understanding the title company's orders, updating and maintaining software for reading the abstractor's electronic documents, manually inserting tabs into the documents, and manually labeling, packaging and mailing documents to the title company that are eventually re-mailed to the title company's customers.
Those skilled in the art will recognize that there is a need for an apparatus and method for generating commercial print quality products and directly mailing them to a customer in a very short time frame. The present invention addresses this need as well as others.